So if you’ve been able to peel your eyes away from the trainwreck currently taking place in the GOP presidential primary, then you are probably aware that climate science deniers have a new “movie” out, promoted by esteemed scientist Sarah Palin as well as Weather Channel founder John Coleman. Climate Hustle is the latest attempt by the deniers to trick the general public into believing man made climate change is some vast, underpants gnome-like conspiracy the left is using to fuck over white working class Christians, rather than an actual problem that we’ve already ignored for far too long that 97%* of scientists working in related fields agree is definitely taking place.

Look guys, I get it. Climate change is scary. It is a serious problem and we’re at the point now that any effective effort to fix it is going to be painful, especially to our wealthy western way of life. I’m not immune. I love steak. Fucking love it. I run an air conditioner constantly in order to make my attic room livable rather than just moving everything downstairs into a spare room each summer. I take long, meaningless drives so my Chow can hang her head out the window and have her excitement. Sure, I’ve taken steps to have a smaller carbon footprint, but the vast majority of changes I made were relatively pain free. Ignorance is bliss; it means I can run my AC unit as much as I want and eat that 16 oz ribeye guilt free. But it is happening. Fast. It is the climate changing, not necessarily the current weather, so just cause we get some snow doesn’t negate the fact that we keep setting records for hottest year, practically every year. I don’t want to give climate change credit for things it didn’t cause, and I know we had an el nino this year, but damn, if you live in Pennsylvania tell me this wasn’t the strangest fall/winter/spring you have ever lived through. Globally, the temperatures are rising, the ice is melting, and the oceans are rising. And this is all shit that a layperson can figure out without an advanced degree in the relevant science. What kind of a world are we leaving for the future generations? Are we really that selfish, that deniers with conflicts of interest that make Andrew Wakefield blush can cause so many of us to doubt 97%* of climate scientists?

Both Fox News and CNN have recently invited John Coleman, one of the founders of The Weather Channel and former TV meteorologist, to express his views about climate change to their national audiences. Coleman is simply an awful choice to discuss this issue. He lacks credentials, many of his statements about climate change completely lack substance or mislead, and I’m not even sure he knows what he actually believes.

To begin, Coleman hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed paper pertaining to climate change science. His career, a successful and distinguished one, was in TV weather for over half a century, prior to his retirement in San Diego last April. He’s worked in the top markets: Chicago and New York, including a 7-year stint on Good Morning America when it launched. If you watch Coleman on-camera, his skill is obvious. He speaks with authority, injects an irreverent sense of humor and knows how to connect with his viewer.

But a climate scientist, he is not.

“Many people don’t accept my position that there is no significant man-made global warming because I am simply a Television Meteorologist without a Ph.D.,” he admitted in a blog post. “I understand that.”

I urge you all to go and read that whole article, it makes the point perfectly why it is one thing for a non-scientist to examine the data and agree that climate change is man made and happening, yet a completely different animal for them to look at the issue and declare that practically every climate scientist in the world is wrong or lying. But the main point I’m concerned with is the meaninglessness of John Coleman’s scientific opinion on any subject.

Palin is actually worse. No matter the subject, there is only one person I trust less than Sarah Palin in the United States and that person lived in Sarah’s womb for 9 months. Yet sadly, for some reason probably related to why Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee for President, some people out there continue to not only care what she has to say, but actually consider her opinion when forming their own. And when faced with Sarah Palin’s endorsement of this oil company propaganda film, today’s best course of action is to turn it over to Jimmy Kimmel**.

Boom, mic drop. (There, that’s more current, right?)

** Yes, those were 13 words I never thought I would write in that order.

*Okay, time to make the climate deniers change their pants. Saying that 97% of climate scientists agree that man made climate change is real and currently happening is misleading and I will never quote the statistic again after this post. Why? Well, sorry deniers, you shot your wads a bit prematurely, which I am sure has never happened to any of you before.*** Let’s go to volume 39.6 of the Skeptical Inquirer to check out an article by James Lawrence Powell: (Bolding is mine, as always.)

Since it is inconceivable that any climate scientist today could have no opinion on the subject, if 97 percent accept AGW it follows that 3 percent reject it. To those outside of science, 3 percent may seem an insignificant percentage. However, we scientists know that a small minority has often turned out to be right, otherwise there would have been no scientific revolutions. In the 1950s, for example, the percentage of American geologists who accepted continental drift was likely less than 3 percent. Yet they were right.

If there were a 3 percent minority on AGW it would matter, but there is not. The “97% consensus” is false. The percentage of publishing climate scientists who accept AGW is at least 99.9 percent and may verge on unanimity.

*cut out tweet from Obama here*

How, then, has nearly everyone from President Obama on down come to buy the claim of a 97 percent consensus? The figure comes from a 2013 article in Environmental Research Letters by Cook et al. titled “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature.” They reported that “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming” (emphasis added). The 97 percent figure went viral and, not surprisingly, the qualifying phrase “expressing a position”—the fine print, if you will—got dropped. But those three words expose the false assumption inherent in the Cook et al. methodology.

Cook et al. used the Web of Science science-citation research site to review the titles and abstracts of peer-reviewed articles from 1991–2011 with the keywords “global climate change” and “global warming.” They classified the articles into seven categories from “(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification” to “(7) Explicit rejection with quantification.” In the middle was “(4) No position.”

The sine qua non of the Cook et al. method is the assumption that publishing scientists who accept a theory will say so—they will “endorse” it in the title or abstract. To count an article as part of the consensus, Cook et al. required that it “address or mention the cause of global warming.” Of the 11,944 articles that came up in their search, 7,970—two thirds—did not. Cook et al. classified those articles as taking no position and thus ruled them out of the consensus.

Do we need to know any more to realize that there is something wrong with the Cook et al. method? The consensus is what the majority accept; you cannot rule out a two-thirds majority and still derive the consensus.

Moreover, is it true that scientists routinely endorse the ruling paradigm of their discipline? To find out, I used the Web of Science to review articles in three fields: plate tectonics, the origin of lunar craters, and evolution.

Of 500 recent articles on “plate tectonics,” none in my opinion endorsed the theory directly or explicitly. Nor did a single article reject plate tectonics.

…..

What of lunar craters? As recently as 1964, nearly every scientist who had studied the moon believed that its craters were volcanic. Then in July of that year, the first successful Ranger mission returned thousands of photographs showing that the moon exhibits craters ranging in size from the colossal to the microscopic. Except for a few senior holdouts, scientists quickly embraced the meteorite impact theory.

….

I reviewed the abstracts of the most recent 100 articles, which go back to 1997. As with plate tectonics, none explicitly endorsed meteorite impact, nor did any reject it.

…..

Do biologists writing about evolution routinely endorse Darwin’s theory? I reviewed the abstracts of articles in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology from 2000 through 2014. Of 303 articles, 261 had abstracts. Not surprisingly, none of the 261 rejected the modern evolutionary synthesis; neither did any endorse it.

That’s all I’m going to quote from it, but seriously, if you are interested in that 97% number and ever wondered about the apparent 3% who do not accept climate change, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. The actual number is far closer to 99.9%.

***Yeah, I once received constructive criticism that I should leave out little digs like that, or my insinuations that MRAs possess micropenises, and while I understand the critique, in the famous words of Popeye, I yam what I yam.

Remember Todd Akin? Remember how he said that abortion restrictions didn’t need exceptions for rape because “legitimate rape” doesn’t result in pregnancy? Remember how he lost a senate race that should have been a cake walk mainly due to that comment?

After the amazing crash and burn Akin performed for the nation back in 2012, you would think that Republicans would learn a lesson from the whole fiasco. You’d be wrong, of course. Why? Damned if I know. Maybe it’s because some of them really believe, with zero evidence, that, ahem, “legitimate” rape is too traumatic to result in conception. Or maybe it is an “ends justify the means” situation, where as long as it results in punishing women for being sexual beings. What, you thought I was going to strike that out and end the sentence with “less abortions?” Why? When has the so-called “pro-life” movement ever supported something with an actual chance of lowering the number of abortions? They can say they care about the unborn child all they want, but until they stop opposing common sense measures, like Colorado’s long term contraception initiative for an example, measures that are actually effective at lowering the rate of abortion, why should any of us give them the benefit of the doubt as to their motives? They aren’t just protesting Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities; they want it all shut down, because this has much more to do with women’s sexuality than the fate of some fetuses. Nothing should prove that faster than the speed at which they cease caring about the child upon birth.

Whatever their reasons may be, they keep beating that same old drum. Today’s “Wait, What?!?” is brought to you by the Idaho legislature. “I da Ho? Well then close your damn legs, ya slut!”

During the hearing Rep. Pete Nielsen, R-Mountain Home, said, “Now, I’m of the understanding that in many cases of rape it does not involve any pregnancy because of the trauma of the incident. That may be true with incest a little bit.”

….

Nielsen stood by his remarks after the hearing, saying pregnancy “doesn’t happen as often as it does with consensual sex, because of the trauma involved.”

Asked how he knew that, he said, “That’s information that I’ve had through the years. Whether it’s totally accurate or not, I don’t know.”

He added, “I read a lot of information. I have read it several times. … Being a father of five girls, I’ve explored this a lot.”

Why, may I ask, has this man “explored this a lot”? Hopefully it is for work, and not an attempt to figure out how likely his daughters would be to get pregnant if he…….

Moving on….

The scientific consensus on the issue is that rape is as likely to result in pregnancy as consensual sex, and some studies suggest the rate of pregnancy is higher in rape. A 2003 study that appeared in the scientific journal “Human Nature,” for instance, found that the rate of pregnancy from rape exceeded the rate of pregnancy from consensual sex by a “sizable margin.”

Is it any wonder if a percentage of the anti-choice brigade decides to ignore scientific consensus? Members of the GOP already freely ignore the scientific consensus when it comes to evolution and global warming, what would make this a bridge too far? Of course, in those cases the only people being called “liars” are scientists and biology teachers. I wonder if they stop and think that by holding on to the “legitimate rape doesn’t cause pregnancy” thing that they are directly calling every rape victim who got pregnant from her attack a liar?

Saturday saw thousands of the War against Women folks take to the street to protest against Planned Parenthood. They managed to get several anti-Planned Parenthood hashtags trending on Twitter as well. While the Center for Medical Progress continues to release its deceptively edited videos to outrage the loud and proud ignorant fringe of the right, elected officials with actual power keep attempting to defund PP while wasting taxpayers money with investigations into PP that turn up no wrongdoing.

It is beyond time to fight back.

Abortion only makes up 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services. Zero federal dollars out of Planned Parenthood’s funding goes to abortion services. The federal funds go to the other 97% of services Planned Parenthood provides, stuff like STI testing, cancer screenings, contraception prescriptions, and FUCKING prenatal care. Sure, there are other locations women can go to get these services, but there aren’t enough of them to handle the overflow that would occur if Planned Parenthood actually disappeared. Sure, rich and upper middle class women would still find someone to smear their pap, prescribe their birth control, provide prenatal care, or terminate their pregnancy. These things are never in danger for the rich and upper middle class. It doesn’t matter how conservative the state Congress gets, or how many clinics get shut down, rich girls from Texas or Mississippi can just get on a plane and fly wherever they need to go to get whatever service they need.

These attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on the health and family planning of all women who can’t hop on the jet for a quick trip to Cali for an IUD or an abortion.

The issue isn’t abortion. It isn’t “selling” baby parts.

The issue is poor people having sex and the right’s quest to make sure they have to face the consequences.

Seriously. I really try to look at the message, not the messenger, but if this guy told me George W. Bush was a bad President, I’d start reexamining his presidency. If he told me there was no God, I’d start looking for a church. If he said humans caused climate change, I’d buy a coal burning SUV. If he said we needed comprehensive sex ed. in our schools, I’d donate to the “Just say ‘no'” campaign. And so on…..

As you can tell from the bottom corner of the picture, he’s obviously not saying any of the above as a guest on Tthe Jim Bakker Show*, so what questionable “fact” is he peddling? From Raw Story:

The LHC is an enormous particle collider built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and located near Geneva for the purpose of testing out advanced theories of particle physics and high-energy physics.

With this in mind, an excitable and overly sincere Zach Drew draws attention to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis where God scattered arrogant knowledge seekers across the land, speaking in different languages.

What? Face, meet palm. Continuing….

“What if I told you, again, today, the ancient story of the Tower of Babel is being repeated,” Drew ominously intoned. “Isn’t it interesting that people from all around the world have once again come together to build the largest machine that man has ever constructed? They say it is for the purpose of discovering the God particle. This mystery particle that essentially holds the entire universe together and, if found, would explain our very existence.”

“This insane machine? It’s called CERN,” he continued. “The Large Hadron Collider. The Tower of Babel. The whole world came together to work on it… The people at the Tower of Babel’s goal was also to reach a portal, or a gateway, into the sky, or into another dimension where God dwells.”

“Is all this a mere coincidence? Are the startling parallels between these two stories just a matter of chance?” Drew asked before adding, “Or are the powers of the demonic realm actively at work right now? And if this is just a coincidence and history does decide to repeat itself, let’s not forget how it ended for the people at the Tower of Babel.”

Well now.

On the plus side, at least he isn’t suggesting the LHC is going to create a black hole that will suck the planet in on itself.

Well, at least he isn’t suggesting it in any of the quotes Raw Story published. I already watched the previous video, no way am I watching this one.

You can, I guess, if you really want to. Here.

Okay, actually I am watching the video right now, and damn, you have to watch this bit of lunacy. He is so earnest! This guy actually believes this shit. Priceless. “Strategic portals to Heaven”? “Angels using dimensional gateways”? Oh Em Gee! More please!

* Wait, The Jim Bakker Show? Is there any level of disgrace these preachers can reach that they can’t come back from?

Lewis’s argument is actually fairly simple: The disease theory, and the science sometimes used to support it, fail to take into account the plasticity of the human brain. Of course, “the brain changes with addiction,” he writes. “But the way it changes has to do with learning and development — not disease.” All significant and repeated experiences change the brain; adaptability and habit are the brain’s secret weapons. The changes wrought by addiction are not, however, permanent, and while they are dangerous, they’re not abnormal. Through a combination of a difficult emotional history, bad luck and the ordinary operations of the brain itself, an addict is someone whose brain has been transformed, but also someone who can be pushed further along the road toward healthy development. (Lewis doesn’t like the term “recovery” because it implies a return to the addict’s state before the addiction took hold.)

I could turn this into an epic rant against the Disease Model or against 12 Step programs, but I’d rather you just go and check out the post at Salon, or even better, just check out and read the book itself and cut Salon out of the deal completely. Of course, I can’t completely stop myself from bitching, so….

Without a doubt, AA and similar programs have helped a lot of people.

No article on addiction treatment can be complete, no matter how antithetical it may be to them, without sucking off the 12 Steps.

Assuming you own a television and a service provider, you are probably aware that this is Shark Week (Trademarked, Rights Reserved, Copyrighted, Intellectual Property Protected) on The Discovery Channel. While I will be the first to admit that it is ridiculously over-hyped, and advertised in ways that border on the offensive, I still find my television channel locked to Discovery. It isn’t due to any overwhelming fascination with sharks, although I do find them, like most animals, quite interesting. No, what draws me to Shark Week is what it pushes off the station: reality shows.

Long time readers of this blog may already have a fair idea of where this post is heading, so I will try to keep it short this time, to avoid repeating myself. While I have never been a fan of mainstream television, I fell in love with The Discovery Channel and The History Channel when my family first got cable television. As time went on, The National Geographic Channel and Animal Planet came to south central Pennsylvania, and were added to my favorites list in turn. Not everything on each channel appealed to me, but there was enough that I was almost always able to find something to watch if I desired, something that not only provided entertainment, but at least a taste of education as well. I do not know when things went off the rails, and I do not know what started the train wreck, but in my mind the change started with Discovery and the building of custom motorcycles. I forget the name of the show, and honestly don’t care enough to Google it, but I do remember that while I would change the channel the second it came on, my tastes were apparently being outvoted massively by viewers who loved watching a father and son loudly argue over the proper way to build a chopper. With the drugs I’ve consumed over my lifetime, I would never claim that my memory is one of my strengths; other “reality” shows may have came first on these edutainment networks, but in my recollections, this is the domino that started the fall. Channels that were once filled with seemingly endless documentaries were the new home of reality television. History morphed from “All Hitler, All the time” into a channel about a pawn shop and countless attempts to duplicate the success of Pawn Stars. Animal Planet replaced shows starring animals to shows starring a crazy guy who captures animals, a crazy guy who lives in the forest, and for some reason I still don’t quite understand, a crazy guy who builds rich people tree houses. National Geographic films the clinically insane and the hell that they put their children through for a show called Doomsday Preppers, and routinely mocks the Amish for all manner of shows. And Discovery? Naked and Afraid. Say no more.

If you are willing to hunt for it, you can still find worthwhile shows on these networks. Mythbusters is still on the air, History airs documentaries on the anniversaries of historically important events, and National Geographic has nights of inspired programming. Animal Planet, as far as I can tell, still dedicates one night a week to animal documentaries, (I believe it is Tuesday nights) and they air one of my favorite television shows of all time, which also happens to be one of their most popular shows, River Monsters. But River Monsters’ season is much too short, and when it ends it is replaced with idiots tramping through a forest looking for a creature that almost certainly does not exist. (Sorry. The United States is no longer uncharted territory, and if there was an actual breeding population of Sasquatches <Sasquatchi?> one would have turned up already. Hell, if they were widespread enough to account for all the reported sitings in the myriad number of claimed locations, it would be impossible to swing a cat without hitting a Sasquatch. No matter where the Finding Bigfoot team goes, no matter how much bacon they throw into the forest, all they are going to find is known animal species and humans who can’t resist fucking with them. I know if they came to my area, I’d be in the woods fucking with them. The two shows, River Monsters and Finding Bigfoot, actually make a rather decent primer on rational thought. On River Monsters, Jeremy Wade investigates reports of people being attacked by river monsters, then follows the evidence to attempt to rationally figure out what the creature may really be. After coming up with a hypothesis, he tests it out by trying to catch the creature he thinks is the cause of the reports, and he normally gets his fish. While some of the fish are much larger than science believed they grew, or living in a habitat the species was not known to reside in, the answers, surprising as they may be, still fit in with our increasing base of knowledge. On Finding Bigfoot, a group of people try to find Bigfoot by first going to a location and calling a town hall meeting for people who have seen Bigfoot, listening to the tales of sitings and quickly deciding that it was Bigfoot, then strapping on night vision cameras and going into the forest to not find Bigfoot. Sometimes they cook bacon and throw it in the woods to show Bigfoot they are friendly as well, although that may have only happened on the one episode I actually watched. Anyway, Science vs. Hunting for Pixies!)

That unexpected rant aside, whether you like sharks or not, Shark Week transports The Discovery Channel back in time, to the days where it was filled with documentaries and education was something they claimed to care about. And that alone is enough to earn my recommendation. Too soon it will be over and you can all go back to watching naked strangers argue in the woods.

Reality has never been a particular concern of science denialists. Creationists are not interested in learning the facts of evolution anymore than the deniers of human aided climate change want to understand how our species’ byproducts effect the planet’s carbon cycle. “The human eye is too complex to have evolved,” they claim. So you turn on the television and call up your dvr’d copy of Cosmos, or pull a popular science book on evolution off the shelf, or if comfortable enough with the subject, just explain the fascinating way that natural selection crafted light sensitive spots on cells, step by step through out the long history of life on Earth, into the complex varieties of eyes found in nature today with your own words. And if you can actually get them to pay attention and follow along, the vast majority of the time the result is the same. They look you in the eye and say, “the human eye is too complex to have evolved.”

Most climate change deniers share this trait with evolution deniers; an ideological basis to their belief on the issue. The scientific evidence for both issues is overwhelming. The consensus is in, and any actual debate within the scientific community is on specific mechanisms and matters of degree. How much warmer is the climate going to get? How much can we limit the damage if we act now? Is there anyway to stop it now that we have started it? What other natural causes drove evolution other than natural selection? What role did gene transfers play early on in the history of life? The questions are endless, and the deniers are quick to use this legitimate scientific debate to try to make the public believe the consensus is much weaker than it is in truth. Stephen J Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium and the scientific debate surrounding it has been pulled out of context and used by creationists to paint evolution as a theory in crisis for decades. They do not care about the context because they do not care about the science. Their ideology tells them that God created us all six thousand years ago, or that men have dominion on Earth and God would never let us unbalance the cycles, or whatever their own particular reason for turning their backs on evidence, reason, and logic happens to be, and that is all that they care about the issue. The evidence against them becomes a conspiracy. The existence of a scientific consensus turns them into a persecuted minority. It becomes more than a question of scientific literacy. Suddenly it is a plot by the atheists to turn their children away from Christ. A trick by the secular left to convince people that we are only animals to change the nation’s sexual morality. An attempt by the Muslim in the White House to get us more dependent on oil from the Middle East by making the practically infinite reserves in our country untouchable. Or the final ploy of the pinko, socialist, homosexual hippies seeking to end the American way of life by forcing men to emasculate themselves and perform such humiliating actions as conserving, recycling, and driving a compact electric car instead of a manly Hummer 3, factory modified to burn coal.

Ideology before reality unfortunately has become a trend. Perhaps it always was so, at least for a certain segment of the population. I would love to yearn for a time past where people studied the evidence and reached rational conclusions on issues, using their new found knowledge to update their ideological worldview, rather than the tragic mirror image that seems so common today, but I question if any such time actually existed. If there is any sort of silver lining to this cloud that interferes with rational policy debate, it would be the unintentional comedy that results when people hostile to science try to claim a scientific basis for their ideological beliefs. Listening to a young earth creationist explain how the scientific evidence really does support a global flood a few thousand years in the past is practically identical to hearing a satirist skewer the same beliefs. There is a reason Poe has a law. The denialist doesn’t care if the scientifically literate thinks his arguments are insane. They only have to make sense to him, because scientific arguments are just accessories to the ideological certainty.

“As you (Energy & Environment Cabinet official) sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.”

There is nothing at all I could possibly add to that. That is a State Senator. An elected official. As Ed Brayton points out in his post:

Smith has been elected to the Kentucky House four times and the Kentucky Senate twice.

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About the Author

Described as "intelligent but self-destructive," Foster Disbelief spent his twenties furiously attempting to waste his potential in a haze of religion and heroin. Science and atheism allowed him to escape his twin addictions and he now spends his days attempting to make the most of his three remaining brain cells.